Debugging your business model

Debugging is becoming a lost art.

I rarely need to do it anymore. The agent handles most bugs. And even before AI, once I adopted TDD and learned better architecture, I stopped running into truly baffling bugs very often.

But there was a time, especially in my formative years as a programmer, when debugging was a constant part of the work.

I remember the strange, puzzling feeling of staring at code I had written, being completely sure it matched the idea in my head, and still being blind to the mistake sitting right in front of me.

Over time, I came to understand something important: bugs are not really in the code.

The code executes perfectly. It does exactly what it was told to do.

The real bug is usually in your own mind. An error of perception. An unchecked assumption. A model of reality that does not quite match reality.

To fix the code, you first have to fix your understanding. You have to see clearly. You have to ask sharper questions.

The stupid way to debug is to guess. Change things based on vague hunches and hope something works.

The smarter way is to be scientific.

Make a hypothesis. Figure out how to test it. Run an experiment. Get data. Expose the error. Make a correction. Then check whether the result now matches your expectation.

Good debugging is the process of progressively validating your assumptions. You isolate variables. You test them one at a time. You keep tightening the loop between the model in your head and what is actually happening.

This teaches you a lot about programming. But more than that, it teaches you how to think clearly.

We understand this in software.

But when it comes to business, we suddenly forget everything.

Instead of breaking the business apart into variables, assumptions, inputs, and outputs, we look at it as one big undifferentiated state. We ask vague questions like:

How do I get users?

Will people pay for this?

Why isn't this working?

But there are no useful answers to questions that vague. They are too large. Too fuzzy. Too far away from the actual mechanics of the problem.

You have to go deeper.

You have to interrogate your assumptions about your customers: their pains, problems, goals, habits, mindsets, constraints, and desired outcomes.

You have to understand what success looks like for them, and what is currently getting in the way.

You have to understand what creates value, what blocks value, what makes adoption easy, what makes it hard, what makes someone care, and what makes them indifferent.

Only then can you start asking questions that actually move you closer to an answer.

A business model is just another model of reality. And like any model, it can be wrong.

The work is not to guess harder.

The work is to debug it.